Art with microbes (and enzymes)

Reader Su called my attention to this really clever contest that garnered some amazing entries. I love it because it represents the fusion of art and science. What you’ll see below are the winners (and some other entries) in the American Society for Microbiology’s “Agar Art” contest, as shown by Stumbleupon (see also here).

If you look at the entries, the rules were clear: create a piece of art using only a Petri dish, nutrient agar, and various species of microbes. Those microbes differ in texture and color, and so, depending on how you inoculate the culture, you can get some nice designs. First the winners:

FIRST PLACE: NEURONS Submitted by Mehmet Berkmen of New England Biolabs, with artist Maria Penil

Second place: NYC Biome MAP, submitted by Christine Marizzi, an educator at a community lab. This art piece was created as a collaboration between citizen scientists and artists at Genspace: New York City’s Community Biolab.

THIRD PLACE: HARVEST SEASON Created by Maria Eugenia Inda, a postdoctoral researcher from Argentina working at Cold Spring Harbor Labs

PEOPLE’S CHOICE: CELL TO CELL With almost 3,500 likes on Facebook. This image was created by the group who won first place, Mehmet Berkmen with artist Maria Penil

The titles and artist/scientist creators of the next plates weren’t given, but they’re really nice plates:

A special Halloween entry:

And this surely must be a tribute to the Original Microbiologist: Louis Pasteur:

I’ll add here my own attempt at this kind of stuff. My Ph.D. work involved revealing how much genetic variation there was at some enzyme loci by performing “gel electrophoresis”: separating variant enzymes by putting them on a gel subjected to an electric field, letting the variants of different size and charge separate over several hours, and then using specific stains to visualize the enzymes. This isn’t done much any more (DNA sequencing is easier), but in in the old days you’d get gels like this (not my gel):

You can see several variants here, as well as heterozygotes, which have two forms of an enzyme and thus produce two bands.

After diligently doing this with a highly variable gene (esterase-5), I decided to produce a gel with legible words on it for my job talks. After some careful experimentation and calculation, and injecting gel lanes with several variants mixed together, I was able to spell “THE END” on a gel, and it was very clear. I used that as the last slide of my electrophoresis talks, and I still think it’s the only time that anybody’s used gel electrophoresis of any sort to spell out a phrase. (I’m sure a reader will correct me here!).

I have it only on a 35 mm Kodachrome slide, which is how we gave talks back in the Eocene, and I wasn’t going to show it, but I just went ahead and used my iPhone to take a photo of the gel slide held up against the sky. Nice, eh?:

Back when I was a post-doc in the old Genetics Department at Berkeley, I used some colored fungi (Neurospora crassa, a black yeast, a white Neurospora mutant and green Aspergillus to grow some snowmen and Christmas tree scenes on petri plates for the department’s holiday party. I may still have pictures of them, but as I recall, they were taken a couple of days later and were somewhat overgrown. Somewhere I’ve heard that an English microbiologist grew a Union Jack on agar when Queen Victoria visited his laboratory. As I recall the story, the Queen WAS NOT AMUSED, though that might be apocryphal (like the rest?).

These are all very cool – I wish I were that creative. My best effort was back in Ph.D. school when I slipped a tabloid picture of Elvis under a slice of agarose gel and ran around the Department declaring that a miracle had occurred. We recorded our gels with Polaroid photos and I have since lost the Elvis one. I first considered using a picture of Jebus or Mary, but decided I needed to graduate at some point. That kind of magisterial mixing could have career implications, after all.